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The wonderful Marika Sboros published my article on 'Satyagraha for the Soul' a.k.a. Dealing with depression, in Business Day's 'Health News' today. Read online here. Below is a link to download the PDF of the text article for your use.
Download satyagraha_for_the_soul.pdf
If you're having a gloomy day, here's one way to help deal with it.
Standard Bank produces a cutsie 'business' ezine/e-newsletter with punny subtitles (see visual below) built around a cup of espresso.
This is bad enough. But it also gets into providing info on generators reconstructed from an article in Farmer's Weekly. It incorrectly defines a generator (they don't all run on diesel, dear Standard Bank) and instead of 'warns' it has an early copy typo in the article reading 'wards' (see below). You'd think that a megalith like Standard would have someone able to do decent proof-reading in their comms.
Why my beef? 1) Inaccurate info. 2) If I were (and I'm not) a Standard Bank client involved in any shape or form with importing generators or allied equipment, I'd be pretty pissed at their giving one firm a punt of this nature. Conspiracy theorists might just wonder if there's a familial reason for it. 3) If this is seriously intended as a business-to-business communication, it's going to be ignored by a lot of time-pressured, impatient people who want a concise, useful and usable snapshot of info. Go revisit the strategy folks and ratchet it up from Comms 101.
I read this snippet from The Times of today, Monday 4th March, with genuine disbelief. Then re-read it. Not yet April the first.
A chunk of the catalyst article is below. I think this Nagel dude should go to jail.
I also think it's time Afrikaner church leaders, academics and community leaders started discussing the ramifications of the emerging wave of racist comment and behaviour from some of their young people. Before it's irreversible and creates a sociological backlash.
RISKsa March edition is out. Here's my article. Right click and select 'open link in new window' if you want to print this out. Text version below the visual if you'd prefer to read it that way. 
Loser in the comms race
I still run across businessmen (I’ve never heard a businesswoman make the claim) who proudly announce that they can’t use computers and that they dictate their e-mail. That’s simply pathetic. In five years time, if you’re not reasonably tech-literate, you won’t be able to operate your banking card.
This year sees the large-scale commercial introduction of so-called ‘smart cards’ for banking. They operate on the same principle as the SIM card in your mobile phone. That little gold-coloured fella is a micro-processor. Whilst not foolproof, it’s not going to be quite as easy to skim or otherwise extract information from your card. But given time, the criminals will undoubtedly get up to speed and we’ll be driven to yet another level of security.
As technology becomes ever more pervasive in the work and business place, we have to take care that our older or lower-tech type customers aren’t alienated because of the technology. A day before writing this article I called in at Old Mutual’s client service centre in Sandton. I was asked by the receptionist for my full name and ID number. I assumed it was for security purposes. In fact, she was entering it into an automated customer service system. I sat in reception and as soon as a consultant became available, the LED board readout indicated ‘C. Simpkins, cubicle 8’. I dutifully went off to cubicle 8 and got helped. It would have been even nicer if the sign had read, ‘Welcome Mr. Simpkins, please go to cubicle 8’. But maybe Old Mutual will get there.
Just by the by, the helpful assistant didn’t introduce herself, wear a name badge, or have a sign with her name on the desk. I played it in observation mode, until she wrote her name on a document and then I used her name to address her. Detail, marketing people, detail! Get the training right. The tech’s great, but don’t forget the interpersonal touches.
That’s the thought behind this article. In the midst of all the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other information capture and manipulation systems, we run the risk of the client becoming a statistic. Having all the demographic (age, gender, occupation, location of home, language, number of children, etc.) data, or indeed, even some psychographic (lifestyle, attitudinal, preferences, biases, affiliations etc.) type information, doesn’t do a single thing on the interpersonal contact front, if we don’t compel personal engagement.
As John Naisbitt so presciently said twenty years ago in his book, Megatrends, the higher the tech the greater will be the demand by people wanting ‘high touch’, as he described it. That excellent book has now been superseded by his ‘High-tech, High-touch’, in recognition of the enduring principle of getting the balance between the two correct. If you haven’t read it, go visit kalahari.net, amazon.com or exclusivebooks.com, but buy it! It’ll give you a marvellous insight into the dangers of your client-base drifting into the arms of a more personable competitor.
All of us in a client-orientated business need to examine the ratio of tech contact to interpersonal contact. Ask yourself when last you picked up the phone, or pressed the flesh (the hand, of course!) of your clients? If they’ve been reduced to getting only your e-zine, your newsletter, e-mails, voicemails and your text messages on promotions, then beware. Make 2008 your year of high touch.
Feel free to use and share if it has relevance for you.
Take on Wall Street, take on your colleagues, take on the continental USA as State Attorney General in
New York. Position yourself as Mr. Clean. Be the paragon of virtue and choirboy when it comes to morals. Go after the baddies. Prosecute 'em. Threaten 'em. To the extent that you become known as 'The Sheriff of Wall Street'. That's Eliot Spitzer, the Guv. Who's just been nailed for being involved in a prostitution ring in Washington DC.
He had the gall to stand with his clearly devastated wife alongside him and with chin jutting at the media, say, "I've disappointed myself." Dumb-ass statement of the year.
As a wise man once said, "Remember that when you dig a hole for someone else, you're the first one in it." Sabe?
Not rejoicing in his downfall. Remember that a very famous Jewish Rabbi once sat talking at a well with a crowd of people who wanted to stone the prostitute in their midst. Jesus said: "Let you who is without sin, cast the first stone." Let's learn from it.
Listen to my chat of yesterday, on Moneyweb radio with Alec Hogg, about the reputational and other implications. Click here to listen or download:
Download int_11th_march_ny_guv.mp3
[See updates at end of post] There's a new disease in South Africa. It's scam-artists like Entertainment Online using the names of speakers and others in such a way as if they represent us. When they don't, and they don't have a mandate to, either. SA Entertainment Online are not known to me, have no authority to use my name and do not represent me. They probably also don't represent many of the other people showcased on their website.
Their rank amateurism and opportunism is breath-taking. Here's the spurious, ungrammatical and unethical 
crap they have on their website.
Jacques de Villers points out in his comment on this Blog, that the idiots at Entertainment-Online even feature dead artistes! Sheiza. Brenda Fassie being one of 'em. Yet they keep the search engines finding the people meta-tagged on their site. Brenda's psuedo-representation by these opportunistic bastards is also right at the top of a Google search for her. See below. All of this ticks me off no end. I even have a rolling disclaimer on my website stating that I am not represented by bureaus, agents or any other form of parasitic life. These people just have no scruple.
UPDATE 1th March '08: You've just gotta love these people! They promise a real quick turn-around time getting back to you. But clearly not in response to complaints or protests!
UPDATE 12th March '08: Cowardly bastards don't have the cahunas or the manners to get in touch (they don't take phone calls remember?), but they must have removed the meta-tagging, as their crappy site no longer lists me. This bears taking as a complaint to the Consumer Ombud. It's the equivalent of the now illegal 'negative marketing'. i.e. You don't respond and you find your insurance premium has increased because of an add-on you didn't want, but which you didn't decline. Those days are gone. These Entertainment-Online amateur opportunists need to know that.
If you feel yourself sliding into a clinical depression about
the state of the media in South Africa, read the piece below, from 'The Week' - ex the UK. If you battle to read it, right click on 'open link in new window' and read there, or print it out. Also go read the article entitled 'No more Mandelas' on the Afro-I-Can Blog. There isn't a specific URL for it, so look for the title when you get to the Blog.
Can you blame parents for their kids' racism? Particularly when those kids are from just pre, or in the 'born free' (of Apartheid) era? Answer: Emphatically, yes! They rear the children on the mother's milk of racial hatred. Yet, there's a new and pathetic excuse of a refrain in town, and it goes: 'My son is not a racist.'
It's used when boys go into black townships and shoot only black people - and not for the first time,
either. Go read here. As a psychologist, interviewed on the topic said, 'If someone took a weapon and went into any urban area, and randomly killed people of different groups, you could say it was an action free of racial bias. But when you intentionally go into an exclusively black area (Skierlik) and start shooting - that's racially underpinned.
Forget about post-traumatic stress and all sorts of other excuses. Most, if not all of we South Africans suffer from high stress levels, and many from post-traumatic stress. But do we all go out and behave like this? No. And these activities by a minority are fanning racial tensions.
At the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, a different, yet equally racist occurrence. Go read and see. University students supposedly protesting hostel integration. If you're not a racist, or at least ethno-centric, why is 'integration' a problem, fourteen years into supposed democracy in South Africa?
Protest integration if you must, but then have the cahunas to nail your colours to the mast and declare yourself to be what you are - an incorrigible racist. But why take middle-aged to elderly black women (supposedly your 
'friends'), con them and utterly humiliate them? To the point where they conduct interviews with journalists away from their homes so they're not identified as the women made to do ludicrous things. Including consuming food, possibly contaminated by urine. Even if the rotten-minded dolt concerned did 'pretend' to pee in the food, it's indicative of a mind in need of serious re-education. Like many, many hours of community service in an informal settlement hospice for example....
Bad enough that this happens, but then a black journalist from Drum Magazine, in the Free State (oxymoron of note) to investigate and write on the matter, gets head-butted and beaten up in the men's room of a restaurant after being asked if he 'has a problem'. The perp asks fellow-urinators if they 'like kaffirs'. Do these people have any concept how this stuff is playing out internationally I wonder?
It's time for the individuals, or the parents of kids who do such things to understand the gross hypocrisy of which they're guilty. These are people who will largely be found taking Holy Communion in their churches. They may well be deacons or elders. They will proclaim Christ as their saviour. Yet they're dyed-in-the-wool racists - potentially beyond rehabilitation and with little or no intention of changing.
And that's why their children do what they do. If you watched the South African equivalent of the BBC 'Child of our Time' TV series, you'd have seen how little racists are reared. It was there for all to see and hear. They echoed mama and papa's bigotry and ethnic hatred, word for shocking word.
If you're reared in a home with decent values, a respect for diversity and a sense that all is a manifestation in some or other way of the one consciousness - including your Christ, good people - then you don't behave like this. Remember Jesus' statement: 'Inasmuch as ye do unto the least of these mine, ye do it unto me.' [Translation: You do it to them, you're doing it to me.]
Even if your opinion of the intellectual prowess, cultural norms, mores, habits and practices of other cultures is not the same that you accord your own culture or ethnic group, the key lies in respect for that diversity. You can learn from the differences. It will make you a bigger and better person. But only if you're willing to do so.
I hope the authorities bring down the hammer on these South African reputation-damaging people in the harshest possible way. Maybe it's time to enact special and draconian legislation for race-hate actions? Only when there are enormous penalties, will it impact upon the limited brains of some people. But then I guess they'll just become martyrs within their own community.
We've become a laughing-stock internationally as a result of parents who, as Kofi Annan famously said when speaking of the Rwandan genocide: 'Have the means (to change or intervene), but not the will'. Think about it.
Below are the "Stars" of the show as featured in the Star newspaper of Thursday 28th Feb '08. Oh, and hey....if you still haven't got the plot, a simple question: Do you think they would have done these things to their mother's friends? Not on your life. Therefore, racist thesis proven. The black women were 'unequal' enough to be the victims. Jesus must be real happy.
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